Greenery Street, by Denis Mackail (Persephone, £10) You may not be aware of Denis Mackail, but he pumped out a novel a year between 1920 and 1950 and was nothing if not well-connected. When Greenery Street first appeared in 1925, JM Barrie and AA Milne offered advice, EH Shepherd illustrated the cover and PG Wodehouse provided an enthusiastic puff. It's not a weighty work; but Mackail was a perceptive humorist not completely oblivious to the currents of modernism. The surprise of this reissue is how easily Mackail accommodated heavyweight narrative innovations in the most undemanding light fiction. An ingenuously simple tale recording the domestic bliss of two callow newlyweds, Greenery Street is full of unexpected, dramatised passages and extensive interior monologues. Otherwise, it's whimsy all the way: and modern readers may find it difficult to sympathise with a pair who find a five-storey Chelsea terrace frightfully small for starting a family. AH

A Multitude of Sins, by Richard Ford (Vintage, £6.99) No one but Richard Ford could open a story with a line such as: "Two weeks before the Phoenix sales conference" and succeed in making the rest of the narrative interesting. This stopgap collection of stories from the great chronicler of middle-American mundanity rounds up a desultory assortment of characters from places with names like Willamantic and Pawcatuck, and pushes them close to the edge - literally so in the case of the novella-length "Abyss", in which two catastrophically incompatible adulterers take an ill-advised excursion to the Grand Canyon. Ford's concerns are narrow but his range is large - the 10 stories here feature three writers, four lawyers and a cop (albeit married to a lawyer). The axioms are blunt but pithy, the best being: "Always try to imagine how you're going to feel after you fuck somebody before you fuck somebody." A little repetitive perhaps, but it depends on whether you perceive a canyon as half-empty or half-full. AH

Ghost of Chance, by William S Burroughs (Serpent's Tail, £6.99) This slim volume is the first paperback issue for one of William Burroughs's final works, reckoned to be among his most accessible. This may be true for the first 20 pages or so - a surprisingly Melville-ish tale set in the Madagascan jungle about the pursuit of a rare species of long-tailed lemur. But then as generally happens, Burroughs takes too many drugs and becomes side-tracked. Life in the jungle offers any number of opportunities to sample the local stimulants, and before long the narrator is hallucinating too profusely to sustain a story, which fizzles out into a familiar paranoiac rant. Burroughs's ecological concern for the lemur is touching, however: not least because these fierce simians seem to represent his ideal reader. "Their way of thinking and feeling is basically different from ours," he asserts, "not oriented toward time and sequence and causality." Lemurs, in other words, will love this book. AH

Love Life, by Zeruya Shalev (Canongate, £6.99) Translated from Hebrew, Love Life is the story of a troubled love affair between Ya'ara, a young, newly married post-graduate student, and Aryeh Even, an older man. "He looked older than my father, his hair more white than silver," she muses, wondering why she is in his apartment and what she wants to do. "He turned me around and nailed me abruptly to the door, his voice in my ears, you like that, you like that." It is a form of silent humiliation, an escape from the predictability of married life, and revenge on her mother - also a former lover of Aryeh's. Once she has taken the decision to indulge her adulterous, possibly sadistic, fantasies, there is no turning back. Told as an internal female monologue - following in the tradition of writers such as Anaïs Nin and, more recently, Catherine Millet - Love Life is a tightly coiled tale of lust, and of the stolen happiness it brings as well as unbearable pain and despair. JH

Losing Gemma, by Katy Gardner (Penguin, £6.99) It's 1989 and Esther has a BA from Sussex University. What better thing to do, then, than jump on a plane to Delhi with best friend Gemma and "do" India. Like all the other backpackers intent on crossing the Himalayas into Ladakh and sitting in the dust as the sun goes down, Esther and Gemma are bewitched by India's exoticism. "Bloody hell, we've just walked into a Merchant Ivory film!" Armed with their trusty Lonely Planet guide, a determination to "have a ball" and lots of swear words, the girls book seats to Calcutta on the Bengal Express. Gardner made the India trip herself having completed her degree. So did I. The descriptions of stoned Australians ("It's a real beaut, mate"), trying to read Middlemarch in sweaty train compartments, and wearing your money belt inside your pants, ring wonderfully true. Less convincing is the denouement, with its cultish ceremony: "Give thanks to Kali the Destroyer. Give thanks to the Great One!" JH

Home, by Frank Ronan (Sceptre, £6.99) "I was born an hour before midday on the fourteenth day of Taurus in the month of Beltaine and the Year of the Rabbit..." explains Coorg, the narrator of Frank Ronan's fifth novel. Born on a 70s hippy commune in Devon, with a mother who is "as thin as hair, barefoot and bedraggled", Coorg is raised on a diet of Tolkien, cabbages (that feel pain) and brown rice. Until Granny arrives. Taken back to small-town Ireland, Coorg is forced to wear knee socks, a white shirt, an itchy jumper and scratchy shorts. His name is changed to Joseph. He is dragged to Mass and taught where to stand and sit and to genuflect and cross himself. After church comes dinner where Coorg, or rather Joseph, listens to men talk of whores and communists and poker scores. Trapped in a pre-teen universe where the reverence given to Catholic saints gets mixed up with love for pop idols David Bowie and Marc Bolan, it's no wonder the boy is confused. Genuinely touching. JH